


Five Times Gil Slept With Bangladesh Dupree (And One Time He Didn't)

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: In-Universe RPF, Non-Consensual Drug Use, five things, please take the title very literally
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 10:56:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14259450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Gil doesn't get enough sleep. Dupree helps, sort of.





	Five Times Gil Slept With Bangladesh Dupree (And One Time He Didn't)

**Author's Note:**

> Heh heh heh. 
> 
> Inspired by someone noting on the GG Discord chat that "neither Gil nor Bang has any sense of personal space".

\---

"I still say we should have blown the whole place up," Dupree says into his ear. She doesn't really bother whispering, and the noise clangs against Gil's skull. He winces, but not too hard, because it would only encourage her. "They had that nice diflourine just sitting there in tanks."

"Yes, because evil geniuses bent on world domination always label their lab supplies correctly. I don't know what he thought he was going to do with it."

"Blow something up, duh." Dupree frowns and adjusts the strap of her gown. "Maybe the Awful Tower? Everybody tries to blow up the Awful Tower."

"It's Paris," Gil points out. He can't hold back a yawn. He already has an absolutely vicious headache and it's only going to be worse when he wakes up. Trying mental exercises had only made it worse. His ears are ringing. But he's doing better than Sturmvoraus. "It's the obvious target."

Dupree snorts and then yawns herself, stretching out like a cat. Very like a cat, it occurs to Gil: taking up more space than required, ready to produce sharp objects if anyone objects, and yet still looking perfectly harmless. And apparently drawn to warm spots, because there's a perfectly good cushion over there but she's still lying draped over his ribcage. Maybe he should detach her and go to bed, but there's still that sharp-objects problem.

He lets his fingers crawl over the rug. There was a throw pillow. He'd grabbed it off the chair on his way down.

"No backstabbing," Dupree tells the floor above his left ear. "I'm too tired to play."

He was reaching with his right hand, too. Gil grimaces. "You were fine, er, half an hour ago," he offers. "You were breaking organ pipes with a clarinet."

Dupree twists his ear, which hurts almost as much as if she'd shouted in it. "Yeah, and it wore me out. There were loads. Aren't you supposed to be some kind of genius?"

Gil gives up and lets his head thump to the floor. "The kind who's trying to sleep."

For whatever reason, Dupree doesn't answer. Maybe she really is worn out. It has to be possible. She's human - unmodified human as far as Gil's surreptitious blood test could determine - and despite her apparently endless appetite for a fight, she should eventually overload on lactic acid or adenosine. Should. Gil is still doubting his father's judgement in sending her to Paris, even as a form of probation, even with the coded letter telling Gil to kill her if he thought her bloodlust outweighed her good sense.

It would have been nice to be informed of all that before she actually turned up.

The weight lifts from his chest, and Gil blinks a few times, trying to bring the room back into focus. But Dupree is only doing a cat-stretch, and rolling halfway off him for something that involves planting her elbow on his collarbone. There's a cloth noise, and a thump, and Gil can feel something ticking his ear. Like fringe. Oh. Pillow.

A few seconds after that the weight is back on his chest.

No point fighting it. He'll be annoyed tomorrow. Well, later this morning. This afternoon. Something.

\--

"Shows the blood better," Dupree says, and grins. There aren't fangs in it. That really doesn't help. Gil finds himself looking at the skulls for a human one, for all that, objectively, a human skull would be easier to get than a horned cobra skull. Most humans can't kill you just by breathing on you.

He casts desperately about for a polite remark, and settles for, "It's a very nice green."

"Yeah, I know. Your dad went all weird when he saw. Don't look all surprised," Dupree adds. "You really think I didn't know?"

That - She - It's not supposed to be _public knowledge_ for days at least. The official announcement is supposed to _surprise_ people. Gil unclenches his fists and forces out, "How did you guess?"

"Well, you do sort of look like him." Dupree looks all faux-thoughtful, finger to her chin. "And you act like him. And then when he sent me to get you from Paris, I was sure. He wouldn't bother with a corvette unless you were _really important_ and he was _really worried_."

Which makes sense, and Gil relaxes a little, but not all the way. "Don't tell anyone," he says, just in case it helps. "He's going to make an announcement. Later."

Dupree leans in. "Nah," she says, and it's that same cattish grin. "I want to watch them go all croggled and weird and laugh at them."

"Well. Good. Thanks."

She claps Gil on the shoulder. "Relax a little. You're not bad for a Spark with a stick up his arse. Want a drink? We've got twelve hours 'til we dock on the Castle."

This is a terrible idea. Gil looks around the cabin with its deep emerald walls and decorations of actual skulls and bones and says, "Sure. Thanks."

Two something-involving-brandies on his nervously-empty stomach later Gil is sprawled out on the Captain's oversized bunk, wondering if he's about to be eviscerated, but not with enough urgency to actually reach for a weapon. "And another thing," he says, mostly to the ceiling but partly to Captain Dupree, who for some reason is propped up on her elbow next to him instead of off doing captain things. Checking the rigging. Calibrating Z-gas. Wait, that's the floatmate's job. Anyway. "He never tells me anything. Even when it's important."

Dupree nods. "Klaus is an idiot," she offers.

Should Gil be offended on his father's behalf? Is that a reasoned judgement or just Dupree trying to sympathize? He opens his mouth to protest, but what comes out is, "And he doesn't even know it."

"He tells _me_ things." Dupree has a knife out. Gil didn't see her get it out, but now she's flipping it end-over-end, which is really a bit worrying since she's doing it near his torso and they're on an airship in flight. "But half the time they're stupid things. _You shouldn't have kicked that guy out the hatch. You shouldn't have burnt down that fortress._ And I'm just going to ignore him if he says stupid things like that, so why does he bother?" She tosses the knife in a glittering arc almost to the ceiling, spinning it so fast it blurs. It's the sort of trick that would leave most people looking for their fingers, but Dupree just holds up her hand and the hilt smacks into it. "You know what you could do?"

Gil makes an approximately interrogative noise.

"Start a coup."

"You're mad," Gil manages, after a few seconds of half-breaths as he tries to fit the idea into his head.

The knife is suddenly in his face, but apparently Dupree is just using it to point dramatically with with. "You're the madboy," she says, with a beaming smile that would look more at home on a tiger. "Prove it. Blow some things up. Build an army of clanks to do your merciless bidding. Have some fun with your life."

Gil swallows. He wouldn't be too worried about a knife, normally, but he's horribly aware that his head is buzzing and his reflexes are dulled and Dupree only had half a glass. "Or what? You'll slit my throat?"

She wouldn't, would she? She can't possibly be _that_ unhinged.

But Dupree just throws her head back and laughs, flipping the knife again without looking. "I thought - " a half-laugh, half-wheeze - "you were _smart_. Why would I want you dead? Your dad would break my neck."

Wait. Why is she trying to talk _Gil_ into this, and not just stabbing Klaus herself next time they're in the same room? Which, from Gil's experience, is about Dupree's level of subtlety. "My father didn't put you up to this, did he?"

Her face twists into a mocking grin, and the knife vanishes. "Nope. All me. I was just curious."

Something in Gil's mind he hadn't noticed was knotted up goes limp. It's good to know Klaus trusts him that much, at least. Or at least trusts him not to be stupid enough to start a coup with no recognition and no steady allies, no materiel, nothing but his wits and, apparently, the support of one mad pirate queen with a corvette. Unless this was reverse psychology and she would have slit his throat if he'd said yes. No, that's probably too subtle for Dupree. Should he tell his father about this? He needs to think it over. He needs to not have a headache when he does.

"I'm going to take a nap," he says, with as much dignity as he can muster. "Wake me up if we're attacked. And please don't slit my throat while I'm asleep."

"Suit yourself. I'll just sit here and sharpen my daggers."

That's probably some kind of joke. Gil decides to think about it later, and closes his eyes.

\--

Gil wakes up slowly, which is wrong. He's used to snapping into consciousness all at once. There's a blinking green light somewhere off to the left, a smell of burnt coffee, and the ribs of the ceiling are barely visible. Someone is breathing. He can't quite feel his legs. He tries moving them, just in case. The last thing he remembers is leaning against the Baron's office door while a messenger rushed out, a Hoomhoffer wing to Poictesme because it was all he could spare, where was Boris? What happened? He swallows, and tastes blood.

"You passed out," Dupree tells him. Her voice is flat and dead. "Everyone panicked."

Wait, what is Dupree doing here? Wasn't she in the hospital? Poisoned. There's a static buzz at the edge of Gil's mind and it would be so easy to sink back into it. "You're alive," he says, as if she couldn't tell. "Good."

"Yeah. I owe you for all the convulsions, though." She doesn't try to collect right away. She levers herself off his legs, managing to elbow him in the groin in the process, ow, and pokes him in the neck. "Don't do that again."

There are all sorts of things she could mean by 'that', none of which he intends to. Starting by passing out in the middle of a strategically important situation. How many Hoomhoffer crew did he just kill by not being there to send them backup? And it's only been - when was the last time he slept? He got five hours, the night before he found out Agatha was alive, before the alarm bell on Judy's hemostatic monitor woke him up. That was only eight days ago. He has to do better. "How long was I out?"

"How the fuck should I know?" Ah, Dupree must be feeling better. "I was in the hospital still. I wake up. Nobody wants to tell me where you are. I have to wave a scalpel around to make them talk. I just told them all I'd stab anybody who tried to wake you up, I didn't say until when. You know you've still got a three-hertz pulse?"

Was that why she was feeling his neck? Gil takes a deep breath, just in case it helps. It doesn't. He can still feel the throbbing pressure of another consciousness behind his eyes, and the yawning terror of not knowing where Agatha is, what really happened to her. "I'll get better," he says. It might even be true.

Dupree slaps him across the face. It makes his head ring.

"Ow," he tried, a few seconds later. The blow didn't hurt as much as he would have expected, but it seems like the thing to say.

Dupree climbs off the cot, managing to knee him in the kidneys in the process. Her hair is a mess and her jacket is missing. Gil doesn't think he's ever seen her with messy hair before. "I told Doctor Chouteh about Prince Squealy's formula," she says, voice going flat again. "He's getting the ingredients together for a giant vat."

The first batch might be already be done, depending on how long he's been asleep. Gil tries to think who's most vital to give it to. Start with the Deep Thinkers and the general staff, they could do the most damage. The process of sitting up and swinging his legs off the cot makes his headache start throbbing again, but he'll just have to ignore that. He can't rely on Dupree seeing what needs to be done all the time.

Maybe more often than he'd thought. Bangladesh Dupree has a penetrating mind. She would make a good strategist, except she'd probably munity out of sheer boredom.

At least Gil knows exactly whose side Dupree is on.

"You're with me for now," Gil says, as if he could fend her off with a flamethrower. "Back to the bridge. Let's find out what's on fire."

\--

The sky wurm is breathing still, side quivering, but its - her - eyes are glassy and half-lidded. Gil presses a hand to her neck, just above the stitched-up gash. It's cold to the touch, which is normal for wurms. He's pulled out the shrapnel, stitched her up, dosed her with the most appropriate painkillers a hasty trawl of the beastkeeper's notes and his own frazzled inspiration could provide, but adapting healing electrodes for a creature that's not even cold-blooded in the usual sense is a project for an expert veterinary Spark with a few weeks to spare, and Gil doesn't have weeks. He has an army to disband and an economy to redesign and a lot of mess to mop up, and the wurm will just have to rest and recover the old-fashioned way.

"It's alright," he says into the mass of spikes that protects her ear. The deepest fugue is retreating, but his voice is still thick with harmonics; Gil hopes it doesn't scare her. Some constructs spend their whole lives whimpering at the voice of a Spark. Her wing makes the sketchy start of a flap, moving barely a meter before it collapses back to the ground. "It's all over now. Just sleep for a while, You can come back with us just as soon as you're well enough to fly." She won't understand a word of it. They didn't make her much smarter than a crow, for all that huge magnificent skull.

There are clouds on the horizon, a smoky smudge against the pink-and-orange sunset. Gil eyes them as he settles down onto the snow, leaning back against his patient's oversized foreleg. They're heading east. Bad weather tomorrow.

On the ground Borhlaika's smokestack is barely sending up a plume as she stands still, a few meters away, an immovable pillar.

There are still people running around, though, down below where the battlefield lies spotted red and black. Infirmary tents are up, and someone has rounded the surrendered soldiers into a formation. Messengers are hurrying to and from the bulk of the docked dreadnought. A cloaked figure is running up to him - his heart thumps, but Bohrlaika doesn't move and the figure calls out, "Hey! Bossman!"

Dupree. What is that she's wearing? It's fur - are those horns on the top? Gold beading? Oh dear. "What is it now?"

"Lots of things." Two gloved hands emerge from the cloak and shove back the horned hood. There are blood marks on her face - not splatters, but deliberate finger-smudged lines, fanning across her cheeks like a horrible parody of a child facepainted as a cat. "That weird cracking noise was some idiots trying to kickstart a sledge with a sodium booster, by the way, so we're out one sledge, and you ... didn't even hear that, did you?"

He gestures at the wurm. There's still ichor on his hands, which he should really do something about before he gets frostbite. "Busy."

Dupree rolls her eyes and thumps down next to him. " _Mad._ Anyway, we got two companies worth of recruits, Colonel Herrington is getting them sworn in, and all sorts of nice loot which should be properly inventoried by morning, blah blah, you know the drill. And I got this!" She abruptly tosses the cloak over him, tugging him into a close embrace. "Isn't it awesome? The guy I got it off had this fancy bayonet with teeth stuck on it, too, but he dropped it down a crack in the ice when I ran him through."

It's delightfully warm, at least, and the combination of fur and Dupree's body heat makes Gil feel dizzy, hindbrain trying to curl up and sleep until spring. He tries not to sneeze at the way her hair is tickling him. "As if you don't have enough exotic weapons."

"No such thing. The more weapons you have, the more people you can shoot." She knuckles him in the spine. It feels so good to be touched, but Gil wrenches his mind back to the important things. Dupree didn't come up here just to chat.

What first? "Did they get the Glacialic Convertor off its caissons or is it stuck here until we have a cargo ship free? I want a better look at it."

"Stuck. You can look in the morning," Dupree says, and slams something pointy into his thigh, right above the femoral artery.

If it were anyone but her, Gil's first instinct would be to snap their neck. As it is he just jerks from the sudden pain, hands clenching. "What the hell?"

The words are spoken right into his ear, but they already sound like they're coming from a long way away, underwater. "Relax. I know your non-lethal dose. Doctor Merliwee told me."

"She'th ih oh thith?" is what comes out of Gil's mouth, which already feels numb and unresponsive, and the darkness overtakes him before he can hear whether there's an answer.

\--

"And you got this in _Bucharest_? Don't they have obscenity laws?" The little string-bound collection of paper lies open on the desk between them, looking innocuous.

Dupree tucks her hands behind her head and plants her boots on the corner of the desk. "Guess they havn't found the printer yet."

The worst thing is, the art is good. Someone who could have done serviceable portrait work or engravings had sat down, pulled out their pen, and drew - this thing. This picture of two people who actually look like him and Dupree, except that Dupree doesn't have a chest that large, and they generally wear more clothes, and the only reason he can think of for Dupree to be straddling a man's hips on top a desk is if she's trying to get the best angle to yank out his jugular. He turns the page with one finger, out of some kind of morbid fascination. In the next picture the two figures are mashed together, faces hidden behind an improbably smooth fall of dark hair. "Um."

Dupree smirks. "Whoever wrote this hasn't been to Mechanicsburg lately."

He has already defended the statues through Dupree's extended laughing fit and he refuses to do it again. "Do you know who wrote it?"

"Not yet."

"You aren't looking, are you?"

"Why would I?" Dupree blinks, in apparently genuine confusion. "It's not like I could demand royalt - oh. Ooooh. Don't worry, this would be a really stupid thing to set someone on fire over!" She thumps the chair back to the floor, beaming. "I might even give them a head start out the door. For the laugh."

Gil can remember the last time he didn't have a headache. It was almost two years ago, in summer, and he was in the middle of mixing the first batch of anti-wasp vaccine while Dupree tried to draw him into an argument about Vole. Right now, the headache is worse than usual. He can understand writing stories about heroic adventurers. He can understand putting sex in the stories; it's a thing couples do and heroic adventurers aren't any less likely to have a girlfriend or boyfriend than ordinary people. Stories that are just about sex, he doesn't understand. It must be like reading a cookbook instead of eating dinner. At least dancers are pretty to watch.

And objectively the illustrations in this are pretty, but Gil's brain keeps catching on the part where they have _him_ and _Dupree_ in them. He hopes, really hopes, this isn't a sign that people think they're a couple. That would make him look stupid and Dupree look incompetent, and probably end in someone getting eviscerated.

No, on second thought, Dupree would probably find it as hilarious as - this thing.

"There isn't a series, is there?" He'd embarrassed himself with a screaming fit when some japester clerk had slipped _The Lusty Loves of Lady Heterodyne, Book Five_ into his in-tray on the wrong day.

"Not yet." Dupree's grin widens. "You want copies if they write any more? Aww, Gil, I didn't know you liked me that way."

Gil scowls and resists the urge to bang his head on the desk. "Absolutely not," he tells her, "and please take this away and burn it."

At least she knows the idea is absurd enough to laugh at it. At least it's not going to worry her. He depends too much on Dupree, for her strategic skill and her incredible tracking and her merciless pragmatism. Dupree never hesitates to tell Gil the unvarnished truth, even if the truth is "You look like you were attacked by a carnivorous tree" or "Lord Silsimus is too stubborn to negotiate with" or "With something that contagious you just have to burn the town to the ground, no other way".

Dupree is the closest thing to a friend he has left. At least there's one.

\--

Bohrlaika takes his feet, and Dupree takes his head, and they manage to get Gil down the hallway without actually knocking him into anything, despite that he's two meters long and weighs a ton and despite that Dupree is running on coffee and sheer teeth-gritting determination, plus some serious stimulants, because normal humans are supposed to sleep at least every couple days and she's running up on a week, and she can't even cheat and drop into a fugue. 

"Get the door," she yells at a guy in a stupid hat, and when he just looks all stupid and blinky, "The one right there, dumbass!" and that gets him moving. She'd punch him for being a dumbass but her hands are full. They shove through into Gil's lab.

The thing in the pink tube is still bubbling, the blinky lights are still blinking, the giant portrait of Agatha is still stuck up there where he can gaze adoringly into her eyes or whatever it is he does in here, Dupree doesn't care, right now he gets to sleep in here because it's the place most everybody who might want to wake him up is too scared to come in. In short order Gil is laid out flat on the cot and Bang is yanking his boots off, purely for the satisfaction of throwing them across the room to bounce off the bubbling tube.

"Do you need assistance?" Bohrlaika asks, in that horrible mechanical-clank-nanny voice that makes Dupree want to take her to bits with a wrench. It wouldn't be very satisfying - no blood - but she's willing to try.

But not when it might wake up Gil, and not when she's this fuzzy-headed; her reflexes are shot. No wonder she couldn't get the Golden Arsehole in one go. "Make yourself useful and block the door."

"I am not required to obey your orders." The nanny clank pauses, gears grinding deep inside, and Dupree tenses and remembers where all the heavy bits of metal are. "But I will protect Master Gilgamesh."

"Good." Dupree yanks off her own boots. That cot is looking awfully inviting. "Then I don't have to smash you."

That doesn't get an answer.

Dupree pulls her turtleneck off over her head and leaves it on the floor while she fiddles with the communicator. She's in here enough that Gil marked the settings she needs on the dial, and in a few seconds she's listening to the low-pitched tone that means Captain Karuna's private code is blinking on the bridge of her own ship. She takes advantage of the time it's taking someone to fetch Karuna to get out of her trousers. 

It hasn't been a good day. The fight was nice, but she didn't even get her hatrack out of it.

The Heterodyne is back.

Which is probably not good for Gil, because he's completely out of his skull about her. He put up those stupid statues and everything. He's going to do something stupid - stupider than staying awake three months straight and stupider than trying to grab the girl when she's _obviously_ smarter and probably sneakier than him - and Dupree will have to try and keep things from exploding, which is totally against everything she stands for, but for Gil, she'll do it. She's used to Gil being stupid.

But there's something else, too. Little things. Little things that are _missing_ , too, stuff Dupree would have expected from the sensitive pushover she'd gotten to know in Paris that just ... didn't happen. He didn't smile when she made puns. He didn't look like he was getting his teeth knocked out when she started sawing the ears off that assasin from Smattenburg. When they got the bad news about the Golden Pelican, he didn't say anything at all, even with half the general staff looking like they wanted to cry because apparently they were a bunch of babies. Disasters happened. Gil had actually cried back in Paris when that idiot with the dog's ears bit it, and that was one guy who was really too stupid to live. 

None of this is proof of anything. Gil could just be shutting down from the weight of the Empire. Could be. Dupree means to find out.

The communicator clicks, and the only slightly fizzy voice says, "Captain Karuna speaking."

"Dupree here." She rubs her eyes. How much can she say in front of Bohrlaika? Probably nothing useful. "Here's the Baron's lab."

"Oh, you're back?"

"Yeah, and I'm staying right here. We ran into this pack of wolves." If Karuna reads that as 'injured', fine, technically she was. "Head for Balan's Gap without me. You know how to get work done on time."

Karuna has the wit not to point out over the communicator they weren't headed to Balan's Gap. "Yes, Captain."

"The authorization code for the new lightning rods is _carpetbag seventy-five-twelve-twentythree heliotrope_. Give everyone shore leave until they're fitted."

Karuna repeats back the code for the lightning rods she was due to get in two months, and Dupree quietly hopes the Balan Yards are as sloppy about cross-checking as ever. They exchange a few cheerful words, cut the comms, and Dupree takes a few deep breaths, blinking through the dark clouds. Depending on what kind of chaos happens next, she might _need_ a corvette with shiny new lightning rods and a captain personally loyal to her, or she might just need her cutlass and the little deathray Gil gave her. For some stupid reason he included a 'stun' setting, but its beam goes for a hundred meters. 

She tucks it under the pillow and flops down next to Gil. He looks half-dead. Not even in the fun intestines-everywhere way, just all pale and still, like a guy bleeding out with no blood. He's warm, though, feverishly hot, and Dupree presses closer so she can feel it properly and maybe notice if he wakes up. 

When she wakes up she's going to go kill somebody. Just has to work out who.

When she wakes up. Later. 

\---


End file.
